


the very sharp thing made sharp on purpose

by scioscribe



Category: James Bond (Craig movies), SPECTRE (2015), Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Fix-It, Gen, Post-SPECTRE, Slash Goggles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-10
Updated: 2015-11-10
Packaged: 2018-04-30 22:20:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,226
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5181782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bond is used to being a weapon; Q is used to making them.  They can both learn better.  Or, the one where you really can stay at home and still prefer not to kill people.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the very sharp thing made sharp on purpose

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [刻意磨銳的利器](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5897401) by [HouseAu3](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HouseAu3/pseuds/HouseAu3)



“Of course it’s policy not to finalize any severance or retirement paperwork you file,” Q said.

“Is it,” Bond said.

“Well, in any case we didn’t.”

Bond only looked at him. Q seemed far away. After the needles, he had had a dream where he had been talking to Q and not known him, as though Q’s face were a half-remembered police sketch seen through a smudgy pane of glass. He felt like that now. The recognition between them felt like it could slip through his fingers. 

In the face of his silence, Q rallied. “You brought back the car.”

“I wasn’t making any use of it.”

“Good public transportation in Tokyo?”

Bond stirred briefly. “You were tracking me?”

“Not constantly. Not consistently. Hardly at all, just once or twice—a week. Or so. Well. Blood will tell, won’t it? At least your blood. I reiterate that that wasn’t my idea.” Out of sheer habit, he talked as though Bond were bothering to seem intimidating, or curious, or even coolly amused. Flustering himself out of habit, in the pretense that they were having a real conversation.

“Anyhow, it’s barely scratched. That’s a feat, coming from you. Treat all your toys so nicely and Father Christmas will be generous.”

Bond picked up a leather key-fob off the worktable and scrutinized it. Q explained it to him—a hidden compressed coil of ultra-strong, ultra-light fiber, too short and too sharp for much rappelling, but ideal for a garrote if Bond would remember to wear gloves—and Bond nodded and slid it into his pocket.

“I’ll make more if they’re useful to you,” Q said.

He twitched his shoulders forward in the barest approximation of a shrug. “As you like.”

“Anyhow, it’s good to have you back,” Q said. He leaned forward and delivered an awkward little double-pat to Bond’s shoulder.

Bond’s body was coin he expended for any number of causes—occasionally even using it to buy a dark and pleasurable vacuum for his head, the way he used drink—and he had, even since Madeleine, spent it out, but nevertheless, that brief point of contact threatened to dismantle him. The closest comparison he had was Moneypenny shaving away his stubble in the semi-dark of his hotel room and, of course, Q didn’t have a razor in his hand. He felt the weight of the tiny wound garrote in his pocket and the world broke into lines and vectors again, a grid that mapped out the impact of physical force on points of impact. A biography.

*

He brought the garrote back in one piece, albeit with several centimeters of its length blood-stained. Q cleaned and sterilized it. Bond watched from the end of the workstation counter, which Q said made him unnecessarily nervous: “You’re like a lidless panther in repose.”

“Don’t cut yourself,” Bond said.

“Don’t cut myself on the very sharp thing that I made sharp on purpose? Thank God you’re here.”

“He managed the sex trade for half of Singapore,” Bond said. “His blood won’t be clean. And I don’t want him on you.”

Q’s hands stilled, the spider-web-colored filament stretched out and glimmering between his fingers like an incipient game of cat’s cradle. He was wearing gloves, of course, medical-grade and a shockingly bright purple. Bond was just seeing contamination everywhere. Q was looking at him like he was something very interesting—a newspaper acrostic or a safety razor he’d been asked to make into a suction cup.

“Are you feeling all right?”

“Like a lidless panther in repose,” Bond said. “I assume you meant without eyelids.”

“Unblinking, yes. You’ve not been yourself.” He finished matter-of-factly unspooling the key-fob-garrote into the disinfectant, unpeeled his gloves, and washed his hands; steepled his ungloved paper-white fingers under his chin. “Not that you usually blink much, of course. Do you want to talk about it? I know it seems like I talk a lot, but I actually don’t, really, in general. And we’re all legally bound to be good secret-keepers.”

“Talk about what?”

“Oh, I don’t know. The night you buggered off with the blonde and then came back and stole a car from me comes to mind.”

Bond felt his lips flex involuntarily. “You gave me the car.”

“You were very clear that it would hurt your feelings not to be given a retirement present. And I had just dismantled a system that would have exposed the secrets of the free world, so I was a bit, well, giddy. In the mood to dole out cars like bloody Oprah. You took advantage.” Q looked down at the blood steaming off the wire in its tray of pale yellow sterilization fluid. “Also, I was feeling sentimental. If you had a car, you could come back.”

“I did come back.”

“I know she’s still alive,” Q said. “I was able to find out that much, at least. Looking like you did—looking like you still do—I had to wonder.”

“I always assume you know everything,” Bond admitted. “It didn’t occur to me that you didn’t.”

“Well, I had to build firewalls sufficient to keep out even myself. And your private life is private.”

“You track my blood.”

“Only to make sure it’s not coming out of you in dribs and drabs in some alleyway. If you’re trying to avoid having a proper conversation, let me know, and I’ll just regale you with _Great British Bake-Off_ trivia. If not, you could actually tell me.”

“SPECTRE deals in women and children,” Bond said. “Human trafficking at a global level, directly into the sex trade. A brisk market, it seems. Madeleine’s father knew. That’s what he left the organization over.”

“Very moral, for a hitman.”

“Even men like us have standards, lines in the sand.”

Bond adjusted his cuffs. He didn’t want to talk. He felt as dual-purposed as one of Q’s machines, but the more ordinary use of him felt unnatural: an exploding watch forced to tell time or a garrote retrained into its key-fob shape. But Q waited with a seemingly limitless reserve of patience. Bond thought, apropos of nothing, that Q, too, had gotten older.

“That was what it came down to in the end,” he said finally. “Sand. I remembered—” He had seen Sévérine’s tattoo on the wrist of a young woman in a Tokyo night-club, one pale wrist lit up by pink neon lights off the bar, but there were some stories he had no intention of telling, not ever. “I remembered what I had heard in that parody of a board meeting they had. A woman in a good suit explaining the numbers of it all. All of that is still going on. Cut off the head of the octopus, you still have all the legs. I thought I had to come back.”

“There was no sand in that story,” Q observed.

“I asked her to come with me. It would be different, I thought, if she understood the stakes. She said there would always be a reason. Our lives together were an oasis, she said, but suddenly all I could see was the sand. We were surrounded by it.”

“Occasionally, you do get very needlessly poetic.”

“She wouldn’t have me like that. In her head, in her life. Bloodied, in her arms.”

“It is a _bit_ narcissistic to think we couldn’t manage without you.” Q was leaning towards him, like a domino waiting to fall, and there were any number of contradictions in his face. “You could have passed on the intelligence—though, to be fair, I think we already knew—and gone. Back to your _oasis_.”

“No,” Bond said. “I wasn’t cut out for it. I was like everything else. I was like her father, after all.”

“You were sand, to continue your ridiculous metaphor.”

Bond nodded towards the garrote. “That was effective. Make more if you like. Though eventually you’ll have to give me more keys to put them on.”

He left. He heard the echoing silence of Q not saying his name. Out on the water, the breeze was cutting sharp and carrying a smell of rot. It didn’t seem like the kind of night to run away with anyone. He wondered if it ever really had.

*

He killed a room full of people in Lisbon: six men and two women. All he could recall about it afterwards was the muscle strain, as if it had been a lesson in the limits of tendon flexibility, a gym session with a few treadmill sprints and a few measured bits of applied pressure and torsion. He splashed water on his face in a filling station toilet. Q said something in his ear, but there was ringing enough that Bond couldn’t hear it.

*

The next time Bond saw him, Q had a slight lift to him, like champagne bubbles rising, despite the violet shadows underneath his eyes and clear stamp of a keyboard row across his right cheek. It reminded Bond, distantly, of the time he and Moneypenny had persuaded Q to experiment with making cocktails of different effects and the three of them had gotten shitfaced. M had walked in and asked them to for fuck’s sake keep it down. It all felt like a long time ago. That had been the first time he had relaxed since her death and the whole event had had the shimmering instability of all good mirages.

Q snapped his fingers in front of Bond’s nose.

“Don’t do that,” Bond said. “Reflexes.” He meant it. His attention had been lagging one step behind the rest of him and it seemed terrifyingly possible that he might break Q’s hands without comprehending it.

“I’ve made you things.”

“That’s what you do for a living.”

“That’s no cause to become complacent about it. Here.” He pushed something at Bond’s chest. “Radio.” A cascading series of other objects, delivered with the rough presentation of a child ripping off wrapping paper on Christmas morning. “Pepper spray—well, it’s a little more severe than that, say two to three hours of agonizing blindness, don’t get it on your fingers, please. This is a signal-jammer—knocks out all wireless and cell signal within five blocks. You don’t have to keep pressing it, it’s got a little tab here you hold down. _This_ watch should certainly come back in acceptable condition. Loud alarm in a literal sense: cover your ears. An excellent distraction. And these shoes have a false sole. Plastic zip-cuffs are inside. Blind them, deafen them, bind them, and give us a ring. I’m excellent at ferreting out the least corrupt law enforcement. Well, I choose the ones I can’t effectively bribe. Oh, you can put some of those down, you look ridiculous.”

Bond lined them up against the counter delicately, like unexploded bombs. He put the shoes down last and felt the leather between his finger and thumb. High-quality, fine-grained.

Q was silent, as if waiting for something.

Bond counted: radio, pepper spray, signal jammer, watch, shoes. Signal, blind, confuse, deafen, subdue.

“Do you know,” Q said quietly, “that people have written about it, and most soldiers do their best not kill anyone? They fire above their heads. When they’re at close-range, anyway, when they can see their faces. Because it’s very difficult.”

“Does M know?”

“Facts about soldiers in wartime? I would imagine.”

“That you’re prioritizing non-lethal items,” Bond said slowly.

“I have a certain amount of independence over my own department, I should think,” Q said haughtily, and for a second he was the twenty-something with the blotchy complexion who had met Bond in an art gallery and boasted about causing mayhem in his pyjamas. (But every now and then a trigger had to be pulled. And what had he said in return? He couldn’t remember.)

Q slid the radio into Bond’s jacket pocket and the flicker of involuntary reaction to sudden closeness for once didn’t trigger anything in Bond but surprise.

“I’m only giving you options. Drops of water in a desert. I haven’t jammed your gun. But it seems absurd to expect you to be this—soulless machine. When you’re not. And it costs.”

“Your broken equipment.”

There were two bars of color high in Q’s face. “I was thinking of other things.”

*

In Istanbul, he didn’t kill anyone.

In Capri.

In Mexico City (“It defies logic that I’m assigning you this,” M had said).

In Buenos Aires.

He turned on his earpiece on the beach after that and put his feet in the surf. Said nothing, but walked quietly along the coastline so Q, also silent, could hear the dim roar of the ocean. His head felt clear but not sharp-edged, like he was able to be at home in it.

It occurred to him that he could try contacting Madeleine again. Q would be able to find her, even if Bond suspected he wouldn’t want to. But somehow he never asked. An oasis was small compared to the ocean and she had not, after all, given him this.

When he came back to London after the fifth consecutive mission where he had burned himself and taken a knife through his left arm but no one had died, he got himself fixed up and bought Q an Omega watch, a real one that cost the earth and did nothing but tell time. That seemed like enough, Bond thought, to watch the seconds and minutes tick away, to be able to measure how far they had come. In a fit of sentimentality, he even had it engraved, though lacking a name or even a reasonable sentiment, he only had it say _Q_.

Q said he got boxes of the damn things as part of some ridiculous arrangement between Switzerland and MI6 and Bond spent his money foolishly. Nevertheless he wore it, though as he never bothered to get it resized it was always sliding down his wrist and having to be pushed up again, and must have been a nuisance.

*

Then it was Cairo—this just after the Christmas party where Q had studied the crackers with intense interest and afterwards made Bond variations on them that had spilled out nails and flash-powder, and M had made a Yule log that turned out surprisingly to be the kind one ate for reasons other than politeness—and the only choice felt like no choice at all.

Afterwards, Bond took the child to the authorities while Q fed the right language into his ear and Moneypenny made phone calls. Sometime after midnight, an older woman who looked exhausted gave the girl a blanket and took her away. Not a mother, not a grandmother, not an aunt, a stranger. Bond thought in a very general way about orphans—those wonderful recruits—and about cuckoos in nests. He was aware of a certain numbness, no worse than getting Novocain from the dentist, only diffused throughout him.

He slept for twelve hours in a hotel room and then again on the flight home.

M said, “I can stand you down for a few weeks.” He made the same level eye contact with Bond as always, neither unkind nor especially interested. “I know it’s been some time since you were last in this situation. Don’t look like that—when I realized what Q was doing all I wondered was why he persists in playing favorites with you when he ought to have been doing it all along for the whole double-oh division. A license to kill is not an obligation. And it could save us a fortune in psychiatry.”

“The only reason I respected you at first was because you shot straight,” Bond said.

“Well,” M said, unruffled, “that’s because you’re a twat, 007.”

Bond took the downtime. He spent hours swimming laps. Moneypenny took her lunches on the uncomfortable-looking plastic chairs near the edge of the pool and flicked coins down at him for diving practice.

He asked her if it was shooting him that had made her give up on being an agent.

“No,” she said. “The pay’s considerably better.”

“Is it really?” with vague interest, trying to shake water from his ears.

“The whole lot of you are getting fucked, if you ask me.”

*

Q seemed relieved when Bond found his way back to the lab again.

“I heard you’d turned amphibious. Good to see your fingers aren’t webbed.”

“Moneypenny said you were asking after me.”

“About,” Q said, “not after. In the interests of precision. Would you prefer a device that can deprogram electronic locks or one that can sense heat signatures across one floor of a building?”

“Both.”

“Had _both_ been an option, I would probably have said so.”

“Locks, then. It occurred to me that you might think I was avoiding you.”

“Well, here you are, so you’re obviously not.” Q fussed with what Bond could only assume was the lock-deprogrammer. It looked like a computer mouse being stripped for parts.

“There wasn’t anything you could have made me that would have prevented it,” Bond said.

Q clipped out a section of plastic. “I am always very, very good at what I do until the moment I’m not. For some reason you’re usually the one who pays for it. Not such a clever boy.” At the last bit, he gave the plastic a vicious little twist and the whole panel of mechanical innards came out on the tip of his tweezers. “You were—frayed. You brought back one piece of yourself, I did what I could with it, and I didn’t do enough.”

“I had a year.”

“It’s not like eating an Oreo,” Q said harshly. “It isn’t, oh, I haven’t murdered anyone in a whole year, I think I’m safe to go back to just doing it on weekends and holidays.”

Bond nodded. “It isn’t like that.”

“What’s it like, then?”

“I don’t know how to explain it,” he said. “You’re the only person I know who’s never killed anyone.”

“I ran over a pigeon three weeks ago,” Q offered, with a sudden twist of a smile, and Bond’s dream of not recognizing him seemed like an impossibility, the work of someone else’s mind entirely.

“I’ve never done that,” Bond said.

“That’s impossible. You have ridiculous, reduce-whole-blocks-to-rubble, ignore-the-zebra-crossings car chases. You’ve killed a pigeon.”

“A deer once, in America.”

“Probably over a dozen pigeons in England alone. And when were you in America anyway?”

“Before your time.”

Q scowled.

“I’m sorry,” Bond said dryly, “I forgot to have retroactively undone things I did before I met you so you wouldn’t be confused.”

“Somehow you’ve gotten the idea you’re amusing.”

Somehow, Bond thought, they had veered off the topic and did not return to it, which was just as well, really, because he had no idea how to say what he meant. It was as irreducible as the engraving he had wanted for the watch.

That he accepted the cost. That he had made his choice. That Q had given back some part of himself that he would guard more closely now and not lose again. That he did appreciate the ability to deprogram a lock. The options of peace in wartime.

*

Q ended the day teaching him how to play online mahjongg: to match a flower with a flower, a five with a five. “There,” he said, pleased with himself, “that will keep you out of trouble.”


End file.
